Archive Hour
The Feynman Variations
Broadcast Sat 18 Sep 2010, Archive Hour
160/44; 65.4 MB; sound quality excellent
Brian Cox presents a tribute to Richard Feynman. Widely regarded as the finest physicist of his generation and the most influential since Einstein, Feynman did much to popularise science, through lectures, books and television, not least his revelation at a press conference in which he demonstrated the exact cause of the Challenger Shuttle explosion in 1986.
Described as the 'Mozart of physics', Feynman's amazing life and career seemingly had no end of highlights. A student at MIT and then Princeton (where he obtained an unprecedented perfect score on the entrance exam for maths and physics), he was drafted onto the Manhattan Project as a junior scientist. There his energy and talents made a significant mark on two of the project's leaders, Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe. The latter would become Feynman's lifelong mentor and friend. Bethe called his student "a magician", setting him apart from other scientists as 'no ordinary genius'. In 1965, Feynman shared a Nobel Prize for his unique contribution to the field of Quantum Electrodynamics making him the most celebrated, influential and best known American Physicist of his generation.
He was possessed with a remarkable ability not only to understand the inner workings of the natural world but also to communicate them to the rest of us, as revealed in his best selling books and landmark television series. As curious as he was clever, Feynman not only made great contributions to physics, but also to other branches of science and is widely acknowledged as the father of nanotechnology.
In this programme we hear from colleagues, friends and former students as well as the great man himself about the beauty of nature and the importance of science to our understanding of the world.
Producer: Rami Tzabar.
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